Black Site (21 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

“Pete, are you seeing this?” It was Pam Archer calling into the Operations Center. Her disembodied voice was louder than the murmured conversations between the analysts and senior staff in the room. Her aircraft had just arrived on station over the Tirah Valley, here for her nightly checkup on Racer. It was just after 9:30 p.m. and she’d zoomed her thermal camera in on his hide, but there was no man-sized heat signature to be found. An empty black void showed on the monitor against the wall.

Grauer had not been looking. He’d been talking to a pair of analysts on the far side of the table. When Pam’s voice filled the room he immediately walked over to the monitor, his men trailing behind him.

“Where the hell is he?”

“No idea.” Pam’s voice quivered with concern. “I’ll adjust the image scale.”

With a series of flashes the monitor’s image took in more of the valley now, the cold river curling like a black snake through the center of the picture. Rocks on both sides of the valley that were large enough to keep a measure of the day’s warmth this late into the chilly evening showed up as fuzzy light gray spots. The houses in the village shone nearly all white where dying embers of the cooking fires and the body heat of the locals and animals radiated.

But there was no sign of Racer.

Archer took her Predator to the other side of the hill, a few kilometers behind Racer’s last known position, on the theory that he might have felt he was compromised and needed to escape. But she saw nothing but some large cattle, some sheep and their shepherds, and an encampment of men, probably members of Zar’s militia. She then traced the road with her camera, followed it ten or more kilometers back to the east, in the direction of Peshawar. But she found very few men or vehicles on this stretch of the dirt track, and nobody that she did find was traveling alone.

After ten minutes of searching, each moment more worrisome than the last, Pete Grauer’s square jaw rose slowly, and he spoke through clenched teeth. “Pamela. Search the river crossing a couple of klicks south of the village.”

“The
crossing
?” she asked.

“Affirmative. There is a spot where the river bends and it’s bisected by boulders. A fit man could cross the river there if he was careful.”

A brief pause before acknowledging her compliance. “Roger that.”

Grauer’s jaw muscles flexed as he waited for the drone to move into position nearer to the natural stone pathway that spanned the river like a rocky dotted line. The water was swift here between the rocks, but a motivated and sure-footed man could make his way from one boulder to the next and cross the river here without having to use the guarded stone bridge in at Shataparai.

Pam centered on the river, zoomed in, and enhanced resolution on her thermal camera.

Nothing. “Negative heat signature,” she said.

“All right,” replied Grauer. “Now I want you to scan all the way from this crossing point to Zar’s compound. Check the hillside, not just the riverbank.”

A long pause from Pam. “Are you saying you think he—”

“Humor me, Pam.”

“Yes, sir.”

The camera zoomed out and then began tracking along the hillside toward the village of Shataparai. Twice Pam stopped panning and focused on heat registers. Both times they were animals in the forest. When she was just a few hundred yards from the village she continued panning but said, “Negative contact.”

“Keep going,” ordered Grauer. He had a feeling.

Nothing for a moment more. And then there it was. Just a tiny white splotch moving through the trees at this magnification. Archer centered on it and then zoomed. Then zoomed again.

Walking along the steep hillside, slowly and stealthily, not more than fifty yards from the southernmost structures of the village, was a single individual. He was well secreted in the trees, but the thermal camera picked him out easily.

“Oh, shit,” said Pam Archer into her mike, violating the normal protocol in her transmissions.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered Grauer. “Someone …
please,
tell me that Racer is not attempting to infiltrate Zar’s compound.”

The analyst on his left just shook his head slowly. “What the hell is he going to do?”

“What do
we
do?” asked Grauer. No one spoke. No one knew.

Then Grauer growled, “Get me Kopelman on the secure line.”

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor hoped like hell that the UAV hadn’t come to check on him tonight. He hoped to get in and out of here and back to his hide, with more information than he would have been able to get from across the valley, well before daylight tomorrow. Further, he would much rather Pete Grauer did not know what he was up to until he could tell him about it, after the fact. He did not want Grauer to think he was on some crazy solo mission, because that’s not how Kolt saw this. He could call this off at any moment: if guard dogs alerted to him, if sentries changed up their patrols, if villagers remained in the alleyways this late at night. There were a dozen or more indicators that could convince him to back off for now, but he was not going to just lie on his belly across the valley from T.J. for three days and then exfiltrate the area without getting proof of life.

No, he
had
to try.

There was a camera on his tiny GPS unit and he’d brought this along, kept it stowed in a pocket of his salwar. He’d left his spotting scope, his night vision gear, and all the other recording devices back up in his hide. His thermal monocular would be his main piece of equipment to get him to the prisoners, but once there, he’d pull out the GPS camera to get proof of life.

Raynor made his way to the southern wall of the Playground. He was reasonably certain that the courtyard would be empty, though he was equally certain that the building adjacent to it would contain kids, families, or at least sentries. He hid himself for several minutes in the brush across from the rusty iron gate that led into the dirt courtyard. He kept his eyes and ears open and tuned to any human noises.

Nothing from the dirt road. Nothing from the courtyard in front of him. Everything was dark and still.

At 10 p.m. he moved toward the Playground.

He did not try the gate. He assumed it was locked, and even if it wasn’t, the iron hinges would creak loudly upon his opening the door. He instead walked along the baked mud wall, up the hill, until he reached the corner of the building. Here, a man-sized stack of old tractor tires leaned against the wall, and this looked like his best bet. He checked it for stability, then made his way up with one hand on the brick wall and the other pulling himself gingerly up the tires, using his feet in the same way—one on the tires, the stack held steady with his hand, and the other getting purchase only by wedging the tip of his sandal into recesses in the brick wall.

In ten seconds he was standing on the tires, looking over the wall into the dark courtyard.

As near as he could tell it was empty. He looked through his small thermal monocular back toward the Playground’s main structure and saw no warm bodies in the windows, which he took as a good sign.

He dropped into the courtyard, immediately saw that a long colonnaded hall, with a tiled floor and an open wall to the Playground, stretched away from him on his right. He checked it with his monocular. No signs of life. He moved along the wall to his left, low in a crouch, and approached the common wall with Zar’s compound.

A door opened on his right, twenty-five yards away. Kolt dropped flat on his face and looked toward the movement. Torchlight in the hallway behind silhouetted a lone figure, a man with a rifle. He stood in the doorway, looked around at the dark open courtyard for twenty seconds, and then reshut the door. Raynor saw no hint of tension or concern in the man’s movements, supposed he was just a guard in the building who patrolled lazily during the night.

After waiting a minute to make sure the man would not return, Raynor climbed back up to his crouch and continued on.

He made it to the wall of Zar’s fortress thirty seconds later. He heard dogs barking in the distance, but they were too far away to have alerted to his scent.

Scaling this twelve-foot wall would not be a problem for Raynor. Sandstone blocks had been inlaid into the wall, and these blocks were used to hold buckets to collect rain. Kolt stepped up on one and hoisted himself to the top of the wall.

As silently as possible, Raynor dropped down into the darkened compound, with the hurja just fifty feet off his left shoulder.

*   *   *

“Holy shit, Racer is
inside
Gopher!” an analyst behind Grauer said, but Pete was watching the monitor, and he could see for himself. There was little definition to the monitor’s image other than the warmth of Racer’s body and some slight residual heat retained in the wall he’d just dropped from. Pam pulled back on the range, and several more heat signatures appeared, inhabitants of the fortress. The closest ones were on the far side of the hurja’s roof, thirty yards away from Racer, but they would not be able to see the infiltrator through the thick vapor hanging in the air.

Racer’s image turned away from the hurja, but it continued hugging the wall as it moved east toward the southeast corner of the compound.

Grauer stared at the screen, the footage from Pam Archer’s Baby Boy displayed in front of him. “Obviously he is going to try and go around the entire property, behind the corral, cross over to the north side before he comes to the main entrance gate, and then try and get eyes on the prisoners in the northwest corner.”

Pam Archer’s disembodied voice filled the conference room. “Pete, do you want me to stay on station?”

Grauer hesitated, said finally, “Negative. You are going to draw too much interest on radar if you hang out here much longer. Why don’t you pull back across the border and return to the Tirah Valley in an hour? Just try to make it look … random.”

“Understood. I’ll wander back across the border into Khost and then swing back to Gopher in sixty mikes.”

Grauer and his analysts watched the angle of the image change, the UAV leaving the airspace, and moments later Archer flipped off her thermal camera.

The president of Radiance Security and Surveillance Systems was angry. His man was dangerously off mission, and he jeopardized everything with his actions. Still, there was nothing he could do about it now from here in Jalalabad except root him on.

Pete spoke softly. “Good luck, son.”

TWENTY-SIX

Things had been going smoothly for Raynor, and he appreciated it, but he knew it would not last. As he turned at the southeast corner of the compound’s wall and began heading north, he took a moment to look through the thermal optic he carried in his right hand. A white image appeared in the darkness through its lens, directly ahead. It was a sentry, he was in the way of Kolt’s progress to the latrine, and he wasn’t moving. The man leaned against the wall, twenty-five yards ahead of the American. He guarded a wooden door in the wall that must have led to the alleyway that ran along the east wall of the compound. Kolt had not been able to see the door or the sentry from his vantage point, as the door was shielded by the roofs of village buildings on the hillside, and the sentry was shielded by the wall. He suspected this door was for the comings and goings of the women of the fortress. Kopelman told him women were generally not allowed to use the main gate, but if they were clothed in their burka or at least a chador, and accompanied by a man, they could leave through the women’s door to go to the village market.

Shit.
He’d been on the lookout for static guards while surveilling from across the river, but he’d missed this guy. Now some asshole stood directly in his path, and it didn’t look like he was going anywhere soon.

Kolt tucked himself tight against the wall, secreted the majority of his body in some brown weeds that grew in thin tufts there, and looked down at his watch.

0220 Zulu. 10:20 p.m.

Shit.
The nightly toilet procession would begin soon, and he was 150 yards away from where he needed to be and pinned into a corner.

*   *   *

At ten thirty Raynor used his thermal monocular to try to get a look into the distance where the latrine stood near the northern wall, but his view was blocked by the large corral and barn and a low rise.

His options were few, and they were bleak, but it was time he made a decision. Unless the guard wandered off right this minute, Kolt wasn’t going to be able to sneak past him. He could try to go around him, but that would entail walking through the center of the compound toward the latrine, and even in his disguise, even with the darkness, and even with the fog, Raynor would need an incredible amount of luck, and he wasn’t prepared to trust his fate to the stars to that degree.

He could sneak close to the sentry at the door, pull out his four-inch blade, and kill the man without a sound.

Right.
Then what? Continue on with his mission, a mission that would keep him here in the compound at least another half hour, and then somehow cover up the fact that a guard had been slaughtered so he could get out of the compound and back to his hide site with no one being the wiser?

No. The wet alternative wasn’t going to work here.

That left one thing. Calling it off. Backing out, making his way back over the wall into the Playground, hopping one more wall, and then getting back into the hills, crossing back over the river, and climbing back up “home.” Four hours of grueling effort, absolute risk, all for zero gain.

Raynor hated failure. He took it personally. As he squatted there in the grass, dropping to his belly now as a patrol wielding lazy flashlights headed up the center road, past the big house and toward the hurja, Kolt decided he had no choice but to exfiltrate. He’d already missed the beginning of the latrine march; there would be no sense waiting till it was over and then heading to the row of buildings and knocking on doors looking for prisoners.

No, this night was a blown opportunity. All because of this jackass at the little side door. Kolt looked at him through his thermal optic one last time before heading back in the other direction.